Torture
The Midwest Coalition for Human Rights’ Committee on Torture works to abolish the use of torture, and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment by U.S. officials at home or abroad. The Subcommittee works to promote laws, policies and practices that respect human dignity and prevent ill-treatment toward persons by any U.S. official, or person acting in an official capacity.
Experience Guantanamo in St. Paul
St. Paul, MN
Visit a Replica of a Guantanamo Cell
A National Summit on Torture: Religious Faith, Torture, and our National Soul
Atlanta, GA
A National Summit on Torture: Religious Faith,
Torture, and our National Soul
September 11-12, 2008
Mercer University in Atlanta, GA
How Scores of Black Men Were Tortured Into Giving False Confessions by Chicago Police
More than 20 years after being tortured into giving confessions by Chicago police officers, dozens of black men remain behind bars.
Michael Tillman was 20, with a 3-year-old daughter and an infant son, when he was brought into the Area 2 police station on Chicago's South Side for questioning. His mother, Jean Tillman, says that although he had gotten into some trouble with the law as a youngster, he had been on the straight-and-narrow, working as a janitor and paying his bills, since he and his girlfriend had their first child. That was July 22, 1986.
He hasn't been home since.
MCHR Endorses the Campaign to Ban Torture
CHICAGO, July 18 -- On June 25, 2008, the Center for Victims of Torture, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and Evangelicals for Human Rights launched the Campaign to Ban Torture: American Voices for American Values. Today, we are happy to announce that the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights has officially endorsed the campaign.
Federal Report Finds Poor Conditions at Cook County Jail
CHICAGO, July 17 - People awaiting trial here at the Cook County Jail, one of the nation’s largest local jails, have endured vastly inadequate medical care, beatings at the hands of jail workers and dilapidated, dangerous building conditions often left unrepaired for months, federal authorities said on Thursday.
Grim images peppered 98 pages of federal findings from a sweeping 17-month investigation about the jail, a West Side complex of buildings, the oldest of which once housed Al Capone, that is now temporary home to about 9,800 men and women.
Join the Campaign to Ban Torture!
Join the Center for Victims of Torture, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and Evangelicals for Human Rights in the Campaign to Ban Torture: American Voices for American Values.
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
WASHINGTON, Jul. 2 -- The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
MCHR Member Launches Campaign to Ban Torture
“No act of war, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture"
On June 25, the eve of International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Center for Victims of Torture, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and Evangelicals for Human Rights, launched the Campaign to Ban Torture: American Voices for American Values.
MCHR Member Joins Bipartisan Group to Speak Out on Detainees
WASHINGTON, June 25 - A bipartisan group of 200 former government officials, retired generals and religious leaders plans to issue a statement on Wednesday calling for a presidential order to outlaw some interrogation and detention practices used by the Bush administration over the last six years.
The executive order they seek would commit the government to using only interrogation methods that the United States would find acceptable if used by another country against American soldiers or civilians.